Is Internet Explorer 6/7 Support Required Now?

k33l0r writes "Following Google's announcement ending support for Internet Explorer 6, I find myself wondering whether we (Web developers) really need to continue providing support for IE6 and IE7. Especially when creating Web sites intended for technical audiences, wouldn't it be best to end support for obsoleted browsers? Would this not provide additional incentives to upgrade? Recently I and my colleagues had to decide whether it was worth our time to try to support anything before IE8, and in the end we decided to redirect any IE6/7 user-agent to a separate page explaining that the site is not accessible with IE 6 or 7. This was easy once we saw from our analytics that fewer than 5% of visitors to the site were using IE at all. Have you had to make a choice like this? If so, what was your decision and what was the reasoning behind it?"

Comments

Took you this long?

[iamapizza]

"Following Google's announcement ending support for Internet Explorer 6, I find myself wondering whether we (Web developers) really need to continue providing support for IE6 and IE7..."

What a shame. It took a move by a large company like Google to get you to wonder about supporting IE 6, rather than reaching this conclusion through your own experience and common sense. Of course, this shame is also a blessing, as I'm hoping that it will get others like you to question the same, and hopefully companies will all follow suit.

Re:No more support

[shutdown -p now]

My sites are all now built for HTML5 ...

So you build your sites to a draft standard, a work in progress that will change over time, and support for which still varies among browsers (and no, I'm not speaking of IE here)? Good job!